Pune: The Pimpri Chinchwad police recently came across a case of cyber slavery — a modern form of human trafficking where individuals are lured by deceptive online job offers and then coerced, often under the threat of violence or torture, into working in digital scams — after they detained a Ratnagiri resident (37) for questioning in an e-share fraud.As it turned out during his questioning, the man and the suspect, whose name cropped up in the share fraud probe and who is still at large, had identical names.What the investigators did not anticipate was the detained man’s narration of a harrowing experience he endured for almost four months in 2023, when he fell for a job advertisement on a social media platform in April that year. He accepted a company’s offer of a data entry job in a southeast Asian country for a Rs1 lakh monthly salary, with lodging and boarding taken care of by the firm.“When I travelled out of India via Mumbai to join the company, officials there took away my passport and told me to make calls through a mobile messaging app to execute online share frauds,” the man told TOI on Friday. “When I refused, they subjected me to physical torture to the point where I was forced to carry out their instructions. There were other Indians and Bangladeshi nationals who were forced into doing such jobs. Those who refused to toe their line were administered electric shocks,” he said.The victim said there were about 50 people, including some women, working in that company. “Some of them, who did not have any option, accepted the job profile of luring people, especially Indians, over mobile messaging apps,” he said.The victim worked for three to four months but was asked to go back to India because of “poor performance”, as he was unable to dupe even a single victim. “They did not pay me any salary and got me to call my family back in India to send me a return air ticket before finally letting me go. Before that, they wiped out my entire phone data and threatened me against disclosing my experience to anyone,” he said.The victim kept silent all these days out of fear, but narrated his woes only after he was recently detained by the police. Pimpri Chinchwad police commissioner Vinoy Kumar Choubey told TOI, “We are receiving complaints of people being forced into cyber slavery by way of job lures abroad. Young job aspirants need to fully verify the agent, company, visa and job contracts before taking up any foreign assignment.”
